// August 2018

The FCA’s interim platform report has already been well and truly thrashed out by trade journals and other research houses. However, we believe that our tools and research are ideal for proactively engaging with the regulator’s long-term objectives and have reviewed the interim report on that basis. But first let’s start with the basics: why, who and what.

Nucleus has finally confirmed what we’d suspected for sometime: it’s going to float on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market. Transact was the first to take the plunge on 2nd March and in the same month AJ Bell announced that it was preparing a flotation in late 2018/early 2019. Nucleus’s announcement came on 2nd July, but it’s working to a punchy calendar and plans to have the whole thing tied up by late July, which is pretty fast by anyone’s book.

We compared Gatekeepers in 2017 to 2016 to look for any emerging trends or changing preferences. But it's safe to say that 2017 can be characterised as a year when Gatekeepers continued to stick with big-name funds, despite their non-appearance as top performers. Meanwhile lesser-known funds outperformed, but were unable to get on fund selectors' radars or if they had been noticed, get fund selectors to up their exposure.

The introduction of transaction cost disclosure was intended to provide greater transparency. However, with an utter disregard for common sense that characterised MiFID2’s generally inglorious introduction, the regulators provided fund managers with two diametrically opposed calculation methodologies. As a result, fund managers, ACDs, data providers and platforms have between them contributed to organisational chaos.